Developed by Chris Butler and Mark Tait and published by US Gold in 1989.
Any arcade conversion to the C64 was a daunting task and 90% of them failed miserably, but a few of them were acceptable and a few were pretty good. I would say this falls into the latter category with Chris Butler doing a pretty good job doing the conversion. Sega had some extremely powerful sprite-scaling technology in their arcade boards and trying to reproduce the effect on the C64 was no mean feat.
The game alternates from over-head to third-person perspective views and the objective is simple, shoot the hell out of anything that moves and avoid everything that doesn't.
My only criticism of the game is the third-person sections where dodging the scenery can be extremely difficult. In fact, the part where I crash into the stone columns don't appear to be passable because you simply can't fly to the right fast enough to avoid them - this is the only time I could see this in the game.
Mark Tait produced some good title and in-game music, which is good since there are no sound effects.
This is certainly one of the better efforts from US Gold.
#retrogaming
